Comprehensive audio recorder and editing suite

Articles Audacity

For audio editing, look no further than open source wonder Audacity. You can record live, convert old records and tapes to digital, cut, copy and splice files and much more. This stable version is no longer under development and will no longer be updated.

Whether you choose the stable or beta series, Audacity is not very attractive, and can at first look complex. However, with a little experimentation it soon becomes a very usable application.

For live sound and digitizing old media, you need to feed audio into your computer via a cable. Your audio-in, or mic should be set up by default, but otherwise can be found in Preferences. Recording is then as easy as hitting the red button on the Audacity interface.

What makes Audacity great in this regard is that editing recordings is really simple, and not pedantic like some professional apps! Using the Highlight tool you can quickly cut, copy, or add effects to parts of tracks. Make a mistake and you can undo as many steps backward as you like, meaning you can experiment knowing nothing can be broken! As you can use up to 16 channels at once, Audacity gives users lots of flexibility.

Editing MP3 and other digital files is just as easy. Drag them into Audacity to open, and then do what you like with them. Adding fade-ins or outs is easy, and you can save in whatever format you like. Audacity supports ID3 tags, so you can add all the meta data you like to saved tracks. There is lots more to Audacity, and luckily it has extensive documentation available online or to download.

Audacity is the best free audio editing tool around. It's an incredibly useful application, whether you're recording live or just editing audio files. Despite it's unattractive interface, Audacity is an essential download. However, we recommend the beta release.

Recent changes

Interface

Selection Toolbar: a value for the previous whole second displayed if the value was close to a whole second.

Finding zero crossings could cause the selection to expand into white space at either side of the clip.

Clips did not drag to another track if mouse was over a selection.

Mixer Board: Rendering four tracks resulted in a redundant Track Strip followed by a crash.

Imports, Exports and Files

Exporting to WAV or AIFF led to a "Libsndfile says" error or corrupted output due to order of metadata in imported files.

Effects and Analysis

Normalize: Fixed issues where normalization could be to wrong value if applied with DC offset correction, or if applied to "read-directly" WAV and AIFF files before On-Demand completed.

Sliding Time Scale: fixed an audible discontinuity at the beginning of the processed selection; fixed a serious quality problem on Linux 64-bit.

Other miscellaneous bug fixes

including fix to prevent zooming with mouse wheel or ball scrolling the content off-screen.

Changes and Improvements

Shortcuts can now be added in Keyboard Preferences to items in the Generate, Effect or Analyze menus, including user-added plug-ins

Nyquist Effect plug-ins can now be added to Chains

New "Paulstretch" effect for extreme slowdown without pitch change

New "Sample Data Export" Analyze effect for exporting a file containing amplitude values for each sample in the selection

New Preference (off by default) to import files On-Demand (without seek ability) when using the optional FFmpeg library

New Preference (off by default) to retain labels when deleting a selection that snaps to the label without extending past it

(Windows installer) New option to reset Preferences on next launch.

CleanSpeech Mode (no longer supported) will not now be enabled even if it was enabled by an earlier version of Audacity

Added Serbian (Latin and Cyrillic) translations

Audacity supports the following formats

AIFF, WAV, AU, IRCAM, MP3, WAV, Ogg Vorbis

Review last updated: 02/07/12

Pros

Support for many formats

Lots of special effects

Easy to learn

Effects can be previewed, and undone easily

Cons

Ugly interface

"Best software I have used for Recording My Vinyl"

I obtained Audacity with my Ion Turntable. I find it very good and easy to use. Editing is simple and converting to MP3 or Wave files is quick and easy.

However I have tried to run the program on my laptop which has Windows 7 Home User version and get distortion whilst listening when recording. If I save to an external drive and edit from my laptop everything works perfect. I just need an upgrade for Windows 7 so that I can record on my laptop.